Crayta Review
"Multiplayer Creativity"
Campaign
This is a game focused on creativity, and the design of multiplayer driven experiences. This is Crayta, a Google Stadia exclusive that aims to provide a series of games to play with friends or randoms.
You can either just straight up play what’s created, or make whatever you’d like yourself. Now with that focus on multiplayer, the builds don’t really have any sort of AI creation and do solely rely on the quantity of players available online.
That is somewhat fine, though the players seemed very crowded on a prop hunt game whenever I went to play. Now, it’s certainly a good game though in general I am worried about the community around this one going forward. It would be neat to see more options for local types of content, as this has a plethora of great customization tools present. They’re all very easy to use, but I’ll dive into them further later. In general you’re launching things from a hub area.
You have a character you’ve customized, and are then easily able to dive into games. There’s this hub I’ve mentioned, or even a regular traditional browser to find games to play. The games are multiplayer focused, so for the most part you’ll be grouped up with others. This is the case whether you’re playing something like a shooter, an obstacle course or some other combination of competitive play. There’s an alright selection of content present, hopefully more gets developed over time which is of course left up to the community.
The creation tools are quite incredible, and very easy to use. I was surprised by the quantity of items that were present, the ease of use for tweaking them and then the variables that could be added on top of that. You really can paint, sculpt and place whatever you want instantly. On top of that, you can test what you’ve been building in an instant. I’ve seen some fairly impressive creations, and even some recreations such as Nuketown from Call of Duty. These are some seriously stellar tools to use, and they work well within this unique platform.
Gameplay
For the most part this does handle fine. I did feel that generic character movements came across as a bit stiff however. It’s hard to talk about gameplay since it varies so much based on what game you’re playing. In general the cartoon-like aesthetic is interesting, and consistent across the package. They have some decently neat looking characters and cosmetics to earn while playing.
There’s an alright sense of realism within the aesthetic design, but it does of course lean on a more fun type of atmosphere within the look. I compare it to say Roblox, or Garry’s Mod in terms of the style mechanics wise. While at the same time being a much more visually impressive experience for sure.
The performance was solid throughout, didn’t notice any hiccups or problems while playing any of the games. For context my speeds currently are 60/16mb and hopefully those get back to normal in the near future after the current global situation. Still, it played fine at that quality and I was definitely impressed.
The Conclusion
Crayta is a solid take on open creativity with an impressive set of intuitive controls, I do however question the multiplayer focused direction as there will always need to be an online community to support it. This could very well be a problem down the road since there really wasn’t anything too wildly available for single player experiences, and or AI driven settings.
It does have some fun multiplayer games, but the joy of a single prop hunt map within an excellent creation can really only take you so far. That is an example, but I hope you get the point I’m trying to make with that note. The game certainly can be fun to play, but there wasn’t a whole lot there to really showcase what this game could potentially do.
I feel that it needs a sort of key structuring game to it, like with what Dreams had which was a story mode built from the mechanics available to any player. I’m not saying necessarily to that degree here, but something that really grabs the attention of individuals and inspires creators to make their own content. I think there are some impressive tools here, it can be fun and it’s really going to go as far as those that are playing will take it.
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Crayta Review on Google Stadia
Review Code Provided by Google
Rating Overall: 7.3
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